Year: 2004

Two words: Veee-go! If there was any doubt — not that there seems to have been — that Viggo Mortensen could pull off this movie-star thing without cute hobbits and magic rings to prop him up, well, check out *Hidalgo.* This is a spectacular film, as grand as old Hollywood and as fun and as breath-taking and as touching as anything you’ll see at the movies today, and while it’s not all down to Viggo, none of it would have worked without him.

There is nothing ‘just a movie’ about this self-flagellating exercise in inciting mass religious frenzy. In fact, there’s so little that’s ‘just a movie’ about *The Passion* that it cannot even be appreciated on any level, never mind the ‘just a movie’ level, unless you enter the theater already in a state of religious ecstasy.

*Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights* is but a misdemeanor, though, when held up next to *Twisted,* which is criminally bad from its opening moments.

Peter Nyarol Dut and Santino Majok Chuor came to the United States in 2001, and their lives afterward were nothing like they expected. Orphaned as children by horrendous civil war in their home country of Sudan, they lived for years in a refugee camp in Kenya awaiting the opportunity to emigrate, and when permission came, … more…

In the early 1950s, Sweden’s Home Research Institute, having scientifically assessed the movements of Scandinavian housewives in the kitchen, decided to study the household habits of bachelor men. Actually, no: the HRI doesn’t really exist, except in Bent Hamer’s winsome and touching film. Winner of Norway’s highest award for feature films, this is a delightfully … more…

I wondered, back when I decided to give this flick-filosophizing thing a shot, how long I could keep it up. How many movies could I cover and still find interesting stuff to say beyond ‘this is good’ and ‘that is bad’? Turns out, I mostly needn’t have worried — six and a half years and close to one thousand reviews later, it’s the rare film in which I can’t find something to spout off about (though whether that spouting is actually interesting isn’t for me to say).

The geeky love, the wonderfully geeky love of bad B movies has now come full circle, from the unappreciated decades of the 1950s, 60s, 70s, and 80s, to their ascendancy to objects of derision and perverse fannish worship on the Satellite of Love, to today, with *The Lost Skeleton of Cadavra,* which affectionately apes the ‘genre’ in all its awful, hilarious glory.